Creative experiments for building resilience to future drought in Africa

A short project update

We’ve been a little bit quiet over the last few weeks as we’ve only got a limited amount of time before going back to Folovhodwe in July and we’ve had a lot to prepare. Sally and Eugine have been chasing up as much data as possible to help Steve set up the hydrological model we are using. They’ve been able to run some initial scenarios about what the future could look like in Folovhodwe under certain conditions (it’s all hypothetical!). This is still work in progress though, but we have a few ideas to present to the villagers who took part in the interviews over the next week or so to get their feedback on what they’d be interested in discussing in when we go back.

In July, we’ll be running some workshops in the village using the scenarios (hence the importance of discussing them first with a small number of people to make sure that it works for them) and narrative techniques to get people to create stories about the future. We’re working very hard on the details of this at the moment and we’ll make sure to keep you posted once we are in the field again.

This is it for now though, I appreciate this is just a short update but we’ll have much more to write about once we’re back in South Africa, which is now less than three weeks away.